It was later in the afternoon when Barrett arrived, bring with him both the Marshal and two additional officers from the force, neither of whom Raya recognised; she knew the local PD well, and considering Marshal Ellis had been a thorn in her and Lucas' side since, well, since they got here in the first place, she didn't like the look of them one bit.

Raya stepped out from under the tree, letting the pudgy Pallas' cat she was petting shoot back up among the branches. "I wasn't told there'd be others," she said, eyeing the Marshal.

Ellis crossed his arms, the puffy sleeves of his jackets doubly inflating as they pressed into each other. "Not my call, actually." He nodded at Barrett.

"We need the manpower," Barrett said. "There's more than one body, almost certainly. Miss Raya?"

Raya blinked. "Yes?"

"We are going to the village while Danny directs the others to search. What is it called?"

"Yama-cho. Just two of us? You know what they're going to say about you, right?"

"I'm confident your introduction will help. Come." Without so much as another word, he started walking up along a dirt trail that was marked at intervals by wooden posts, leading away from the frontal facade of the Foxhole.

"Good luck." Raya gave Wyland, who was leaning against the wall of the building, an apologetic smile, before flashing her fangs at the Marshal and hurrying up the slope after Barrett. Fuck, she thought. He's fast.

Barrett was deceptively speedy. It was a fact largely unknown to those that didn't work with him in his hunting endeavours, but the magic of the Wild Hunt did also manifest in the way of an expeditious gale; as Raya tried to run after him, she could see a clear discrepancy between the number of steps he took or the length of his strides and the distance he actually traveled. He seemed to flash up the slope ahead of her at an unmatchable pace, and soon she was left trying to run up the slope, to no avail.

"Wait! Barrett!" she gasped as she finally caught up to him at the crest of the hill, and only because he had stopped and cast his gaze down upon her. "What the hell! How are you even...that..."

Barrett didn't reply to that particular question, but the fervor that coursed through him just moments before was now gone, and the air seemed still again. "I sensed it."

"Sensed what?"

"The thing that froze those men. It's near."

"There was only one corpse."

"The Marshal will find more. Possibly many more, and all of them men." Barrett cast his eyes up along the mountain's incline.

Raya curled her tail around into her jacket for additional warmth. "You know what did this, don't you?"

"I have an idea."

"So...what is it?"

"Not until I talk to the elders." He continued his march, this time at a far more human pace. The mantle he wore was lifted by the chilling wind, streaming out behind him almost like wings.

They forged on in silence, ascending higher and higher via a series of successively steeper paths, until Raya stopped and pointed. "There."

Barrett followed her gesture towards an unmarked gap in the distant treeline, only a few more hills up from where they were. What laid through there seemed physically darker, even though nothing around it indicated it should be way. He then gave her an expectant look.

Raya took the hint, stepping past him, and turned the corner around the nearest cliffs to see a trail of broken, flattened stones which cut through the rock - a path, even if it was a crappy one. She carefully placed her boots on the rocks, using the friction to help herself up faster, and turned back to help Barrett up the same way.

Finally now, they stood at the place where the trees seemed to part, and its swathe ran up into the highest parts of the mountain. Where the mountainside should be fully exposed to sunlight there simply...wasn't.

"Any protocol?"

She looked at him strangely. "I don't know, does your team have one for cases like this?"

"No."

"Then no. Come on." She took a step forwards, passing through the threshold. It felt like a whisper past her ear, a gasp that went by just as quickly as it had sounded, and she was standing before a large red gate that framed a series of stone steps, beckoning the way forwards.

Barrett came through as she did, making the air ripple and he passed the barrier, and he looked up at the gate with an indecipherable expression.

"It's a torii gate," she said.

He said nothing. Barrett kept staring at the gate, the details of its construction becoming more apparent as he did so. While sturdy, it was clear the wood had rotted in many places, and now that Raya looked at it too, the red paint barely made it halfway up the structure, leaving the uppermost aspects shrouded in its own dark palour.

Sharp, whipping noises interrupted their trance, cutting through the branches and the leaves at an alarming pace, burning straight towards the two of them. In an instant Barrett's pistol was in his hand, already taking aim at the fluid shapes shooting from tree to tree, poised to fire.

"Wait, don't!" She reached out to grab his gun arm, to disrupt his aim...and then found it unnecessary when two blades materialised, one at each of their throats, their folded steel construction incredibly apparent from extreme closeness.

At the base of each blade, gripping the hilt with clawed fingers, was a vaguely humanoid creature, the majority of its face made up of a large, red beak, and above that was a pair of piercing and rather very human eyes.

Barrett slowly lowered his sidearm.

Raya swallowed. "Guess we're here."

"So what's the deal with the pub?"

"Huh?"

"Raya and Lucas don't seem to like you a whole lot."

Marshal Wyatt Ellis poked at a lump of snow with his boot, and seeing as it was nothing, turned to give Wyland an annoyed look. "Not a chance you don't already know."

"What I know comes from one side," he said. "Could be biased for all I care, right?"

"Is the punchline here going to be you pretending to care?"

"I do care though." Wyland hopped over a small rock in his path. His boots made deep impressions in the snow on the other side of it. "If my colleagues are messed up don't I have a right to know?"

"You know how they got that land?"

He nodded. "Raya's father had it for a while."

"And how do you suppose that bit of land got all those legal rulings declared on it? If it's possible why don't we see everybody and their grandma moving to avoid paying taxes to Her Eminence's government?"

"Because...it would be unethical?"

"People are never that good. The way those exemptions were applied by Corvus, that's textbook abuse of power. Look at what Walker does with it. A terrorist cell stops by to discuss their plans right under our noses and we would never know. It's sickening and it sets a precedent. Mockery's what it is."

"Has anything bad come out of it?"

The Marshal was silent for a moment, thinking hard while his temperature probe worked in his off hand. "Not yet."

"So you're telling me it really could just be a place where people go to have the fun they want with little to no government regulation, and Lucas and Raya can actually see bad eggs coming from a mile away?"

"You know it's not that simple."

"It's also not as simple as 'bad people exist and therefore they will definitely be involved in this'. Or that either of them are bad people."

"Let's agree to disagree. If there's one thing you can count on it's people working in their self-int-" the radio on his belt crackled and the Marshal scooped it up. "Anything?"

"Have you combed the lake yet?"

"No need, we can see all the way across it. What's this about, Hicks?"

"Look at the lake. Across it. Was that always there?"

"Was wha-"

Wyland had already raced over to a large rock, climbing onto it and peering into his binoculars. "Ah shit."

Ellis got onto the rock and motioned for the optics, which Wyland handed over, though he didn't stop staring. He peered through them himself.

There was another body on the ice of the lake on its knees with its head down, almost in prayer. He thrust the binoculars back into Wyland's hands and ran out across the ice, gripping the radio in one hand. "Sure as fuck wasn't there before! Fan out! Whoever it is is still around he-"

He stopped when he saw the figure on the far side of the lake, silhouetted against the white of the landscape. He drew his pistol. "Stop right there!"

The figure didn't move an inch.

"You there! Identify yourself!" He moved towards the creature. "Hicks," he said into his radio. "You and Alleane go around the lake, flank it. It's not getting away this time."

Crack.

He looked down to where his next step had landed. The dark ice under his weight was becoming progressively more cracked in a spiderweb pattern that spread out and away from his foot's impact.

Wyland could only watch in horror as the ice broke under Ellis, and the Marshal vanished into the frigid lake below.